Timcast IRL - Houthis ATTACK Saudi Oil Tankers, Iran War EXPANDS w/ Mike Benz & Josie TRHL

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Phil, Brett, & Carter are joined by Josie TRHL & Mike Benz to discuss the Houthi Rebels attacking Saudi oil tankers as the Iran war continues to expand, outrage after congress approves plan to "integrate" Israeli & American militaries, and a GOP investigation alleging the FBI blocked the inspection of a Wuhan virus researcher during the COVID pandemic.   Hosts:  Phil @PhilThatRemains (X) | https://allthatremains.komi.io/ Brett  @brettdasovic  (X) |  @PopCultureCrisis  (everywhere) Producer: Carter @carterbanks (X) |  @trashhouserecords  (YT) Guests: Mike Benz @MikeBenzCyber (everywhere) Josie @TRHLOfficial (X) |  @The_Josie_Show  (YouTube)

Today, the Guardian is reporting today that the Middle East crisis is getting out of control. The Houthis have been attacking ships that are in the Red Sea. You've got Iran that are going after ships in the Strait of Hormuz. This is a big problem, clearly, and it's led the Saudis to be concerned with getting nuclear weapons, which is something that the U.S. has been trying to avoid. But apparently, the U.S. approved it, and now the deal might be in limbo or the U.S. might not be approved. it, but we're going to talk about that. The House has passed a

$1.15 trillion NDAA. Now, the NDAA is something the House the government passes every year because it's the National Defense Authorization Act. This particular year, there is a provision in the NDA that has some

kind of merging of U.S. intel and military with the Israeli intel and military. This is a problem for a lot of people, and so we're going to discuss that. Ray and Paul has told or has put up a website, I guess, that has a bunch more information about COVID and the leaks and the lab leak theory. I guess Dr. Fauci is now in more hot water, allegedly in more hot water. We'll see if anything comes.

We're going to talk about that a whole lot. And there was a stabbing in New York, in New York City. And the attacker yelled Alahuah Akbar as he stabbed two men. So this is something that obviously we're going to talk about here. And one more big issue that we're talking about is there's been 20 deaths currently linked to chat GPT so far. So Open AI is facing litigation over this. AI is going to be something that is going to be in our lives. And we're going to talk about the ramifications for that.

So before we get into any and all of that stuff, we want you to head on over to Bunker branding and go ahead and pick up some Timcast merch. There's right now we're showing you Ian's betrayal. It's a bunch of the people from the Timcast crew. I'm over here and back shooting at Ian. I mean, you've all seen me talk to Ian and you know that I would never, ever harm Ian because he's a wonderful person. But you head on over to bunker branding. Also head on over to rumble.com so you can join us for the after show.

Head on over to Timcast.com where you can join our Discord and call in to the after show. But joining us tonight to talk about all of the things that we mentioned, Mike Benz. Hello. How are you, Mike? Who are you? Great. I'm just a guy on the Internet. Okay, then. I mean, you guys know Mike, right? He's been here before. So, you know, he'll talk about the blob and he'll probably talk about CIA. And it seems like we'll probably have a couple things to say about the Rand Paul Fauci stuff.

So Josie's here tonight. Hi, everybody. I'm Josie. I'm the Red-Headed Libertarian. I'm on X. I don't know, baby machine and queen of the trads. Oh, hi, guys. Two days in a row. How's it going? Brett. I appreciate that.

What's it? Sorry, I just said, I appreciate you. Yeah, yeah. I'm what they call the B team here. They pull me in when everybody's out of town and that's okay. Normally doing PCC live five days a week, Monday through Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern. You should join us there.

It's a lot of fun, but we've got politics to get into, right, Carter? We do. I'm Carter Banks. Thanks for watching tonight. We got Phil hosting and Brett is here, Mike Benz and Josie the red-headed libertarian. I'm glad you all came. Let's get to the news. All right.

So from Reuters right now, Trump vows to punish Iran for Houthi attacks in the Red Sea as oil surges over $100. From Dubai, U.S. President Donald Trump promised on Thursday a major military punishment for Iran and its Houthi allies after the Yemeni fighter struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, extending the Middle East war to a second major shipping choke point. Fears that disruption could widen further to block. another sea route sent global prices surging in one of the steepest rises of the war. Brent crude rose more than 6% breaking through $100 of a row for the first time since May. Two weeks since the effect of collapse of an interim truce meant to end the war, the U.S. military launched another round of airstrikes on Iran overnight into Thursday, prompting Iran to fire at neighboring Arab countries that house U.S. bases.

Iranian state media set a missile struck Kwashem Island on the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday evening, raising the prospect of further night attacks in a conflict well into its fifth month, that has already killed thousands and raised fears of a global economic downturn. The Houthi's getting involved in this and going after the Red Sea, it really is an escalation that could cause significant problems to the economy. The U.S. had really kind of had basically oil shipping and prices relatively managed, especially considering the predictions in February and April. people were talking about $200 a barrel oil and the price of gas was going to go through the roof.

And it seemed like as long as the conflict stayed in the Strait-Armuz and between Iran and the U.S., that seemed like that was going to be kind of the same. But the Houthi is getting involved now, going after the Red Sea, making sure that the problem escalates further across the region is something that is likely to continue to drive up oil. prices and it's going to be something that's going to make an already generally unpopular war, very unpopular with the American people if the price of gas continues to go up, you know? Yeah. I mean, the second front being opened is obviously going to cause a lot of headaches. You know, one of the things that brought the price of oil down was the fact that a lot of ships

were not, they respected the threat, so to speak, of shipping, you know, containers being blown up and vessels being blown up in the strait. And, you know, a deal looked like it was forthcoming on the table. The deal terms would be expected. You know, we were, it was always just around the corner for about a month and a half after about the 70-day mark in the war. And, and then, you know, basically we're, since the conflict reignited kinetically, we're now in this situation where ships,

did attempt to go through and then we're getting blown up. That caused an escalation in the prices. And then with the Houthis now opening up a second front, there's a question about whether any shipping is going to be able to move, you know, basically through either front. And that is obviously going to have a number of spiral effects. Yeah. I mean, we're not able to contain the Houthis. We tried to neutralize the Houthi problem last year. with limited success. Yeah, I mean, when it's an issue of the straight of horn moves, you have to worry about, you know,

stuff that's coming out of any of those particular Gulf states. But when it comes to, you know, the Red Sea, then that's something where you're dealing with a lot of global traffic. It's not just oil, you know. Trying to go, you know, going through the Red Sea to get to the Med is one thing going around the Horn of Africa is a totally, totally different thing. I've heard that it takes an additional 14 days to get around Africa or something. And, you know, that's for any product that comes basically from Asia and heads to the West, right?

Like, so all of Europe has got to worry about this. Obviously, the U.S. does. I mean, I guess less so because you could feasibly or you could conceive of them going across the Pacific. But I don't know anything about shipping lanes. I don't know what it's like to go, you know, across the Pacific or if that even happens very much. That's why we need the sub-Saharan canal. It's a canal straight through, like Eritrea, Ethiopia, just all of it's a straight line. It's called the Donald Trump Sub-Saharan Canal. There's talk of building, or at least the Saudis, we're talking about trying to divert around the... Trying to do an overland kind of like railway type thing to be able to move, you know, kind of by... But that creates its own problems.

Now you're creating, you know, bridges and, I mean, this is what we were. we're classically doing to destabilize Syria is, you know, if you have oil pipelines or you have logistics over land, you can just bomb the logistics on land. And the Houthis have no compunction about attacking that stuff. So what do they do? Look, going into midterms, what do they do to try and stabilize oil prices? Because it doesn't look like this is stopping anytime soon. And like we've said before, midterms are largely predicated upon whether people are feeling it in their wallets. This can't stand if it makes it all the way to there. They're going to lose even more than people already are imagining they're going to.

They're going to do what they always do is borrow against our reserves. Yeah, they do do that all the time, don't. Well, the ticking time bomb question is the reserves. I mean, one of the things that I think was, I think, shocking to a lot of people is, you know, were various disclosures made in the, around the time the MOU was announced that part of the attempt to strike the deal was, based on a perception that we were running low on oil reserves and had to actually strike some sort of detente in order to mitigate reserves from being depleted.

And that was one of the things that I believe the Iranian foreign minister on X in announcing the MOU said that, you know, the admin was in a position of desperation, and that's why they did it. And then you had some contemporaneous statements around the depleted reserves. and who knows what's true or not true there, but that there is, if this escalates, it could make an MOU 2.0 a kind of functional necessity to strike ahead of the midterms. Yeah, I don't know if I have a strong take on what it means for the midterms.

I don't know how fast they can get a significant amount of Venezuelan, crude actually into the market, you know, as oil that can be refined or whatever. I don't know, you know, I don't have a strong take. I do think that the Republicans are in a great position outside of this conflict. But considering, you know, how much damage has already been done to Iran, I don't know that Iran is going to go ahead and be like, okay, if the U.S. were to say, pull out and stop, right? Like, so there's a lot of people that are anti-war that are like, just stop, right? Just stop. It's a terrible idea. This is not going well. Just, just stop. If that were to happen, Iran's, it doesn't go back to normal. You know, Iran's not going to be,

okay, you stop, blah, blah, blah. It'll be fine now. You know, the rules have all changed regarding probably the straight of Hormuz. So you're going to likely have to have the military, um, guarding ships that want to go through the straight of Hormuz, if at all. Oran's going to say, well, we're just going to, you know, close the straight when we feel like it or what have you, trying to apply pressure. So the idea that the idea that just pulling out, fixes things. I don't see that as as realistic. And so I'm not sure that there's any solution that the U.S. has that's good about the midterms. I think the most that the Republicans can rely on now is they can, first of all, like Josie said, they can, Donald Trump can go into the the strategic reserves,

which I think is a bad idea. But at the end of the day, especially for political motivators, that that's a terrible idea. But that's possibly what they're going to do. And then, they have to rely on on how unpopular the democrats are now and the democrats are not looking particularly well i we just had something on c a bit from cnn and a couple days ago where the democrats at this point in like in 2018 or whatever was uh they were up by like 16 points and in 2000 not sure exactly what it was i'm not sure the dates but they were the last two elections they were up by like 16 and up by 10 and now their their lead is only plus four, which is like within the margin of error. So granted, the Republicans are in a very precarious

position right now. And I don't think that it's likely that they're going to take the House or that they're going to, they're going to take back the Senate. But they could keep the House even with that kind of, with those kind of numbers because there's redistricting and the, the bad polling numbers that the Democrats are getting because of all the DSA candidates that are making a lot of noise in the news and stuff. And I think the American people, specifically people that are likely to go out and vote in the midterms,

I don't think that they like the messages that they're hearing from the DSA. And they're underfunded because of the USAID shut down. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's honestly, like I think Tim was talking about it the other day. I think they have like 30 million or something like that. I'm not sure exactly what is, but it's a significant, like the Republicans have like almost a billion dollars

through all the packs and stuff. And I think the Democrats have something like 300 million or something like that. but it's a significant deficit. And when you have very little money and a bad message, you know, you don't motivate people to go to the polls. Again,

especially when you're dealing with the people that like the DSA, they're young people, there are people that are not high propensity voters, and you're dealing with the people that are, that are, are the high propensity voters, they're people that have, you know,

some property, they got houses, they don't want to hear people saying, oh, we're going to take your, we hate landlords because they're Airbnb being their, uh, their, uh,

their houses. and they don't want to hear that someone wants to be elected that's going to take away their property or something like that. And that's what they hear when they hear socialism. As much as young people are favorable to the idea or the term socialism, they think of it as just health care and, you know, free school. Older people, boomers and people, my generation, like, they have a different understanding of socialism. They understand that there's a lot of expropriation, a lot of things that go along with it. So these high propensity voters, the boomers, the boomer, they know exactly or they have a certain conception of what the DSA is talking about,

which likely actually aligns with what the DSA means, and they're not going to vote for them. Is there a gap in the younger age of voters who show up for midterm elections in the left versus the right? Like do more Democrats or more Republicans show up? Because I know that in general, young people don't vote unless it's the national elections and stuff like that or presidential election. Is there a gap between the left and the right and who shows up? for midterms? I don't have numbers, but my gut instinct is yes, because the left are the activists.

Well, that's what I was saying, because the way I was imagining what you were saying was that you're saying that, like, Republicans or at least boomers who want to keep their property are more likely to show up for this election because it's a midterm and the rest, the kids are going to stay home. But the way I think about it is that the activists are the one that show up for all the elections. That's why they win the school boards. That's why they win the local elections. I think that's a good instinct, but at the same time, I think that the number of actual activists out there that'll get out and vote. They're not funded anymore either. They're not.

But compared to the number of boomers, because Gen Z is a smaller generation anyways. There are fewer people in Gen Z. And so you're dealing with, even if the numbers were 50-50, Gen Z being right and left, you're dealing with, you know, five or 10 percent that are actually the activists. and you've got like, you know, all the boomers that are out there going to say, you know, I want to, you know, I don't want to elect someone that's going to take my, you know, take things away from me. And I don't know, the, there are only certain districts where these people are running and they have some kind of, you know, grassroots support or what have you. But I think to Mike's point, without the USAID money, they just don't have the reserves to be able to

to get out there and say, hey, you know, we're going to make a serious push. And I don't know how useful past precedent and data is on this because, you know, the MAGA revolution really changed a lot of young Republican dynamics. You know, it used to be the case that Republican Party was sort of all older, you know, you know, the classic quote. If you're, you know, if you're young and conservative, you don't have a heart. If you're, if you're old and liberal, you don't have a brain sort of thing. And so you had a natural skewing of the younger demographic, I think, showing up just in the midterms just by virtue of, you know, the young Democrats being the activist class.

But I think that with the MAGA movement, you had a lot of young people, Charlie and the turning point sort of revolution with diehards who would show up in, I suspect, in numbers that Republican, you know, movements of the past did not. And I think that actually in the 2024 election, didn't Trump win at least in the white demographic, but I believe like it was a historical sort of young people demo that was captured in 2024. And the key question is going to be, in my view, the mobilization of the new sort of new-o-maga hesitant, the kind of maga diehards who may or may not be feeling disenchanted because of, you know, certain policy pursuits of the admin. And this gets, you know, to a number of issues that are kind of playing out contemporaneously. Even in the Iran situation, you know, the reason the MOU blew apart was because of the Israel-Lebanon provision in the MOU.

And when, you know, the Israel sort of continued the ingress into Lebanon that was perceived as a violation of the MOU, then Iran began firing on ships saying, you know, listen, we told you, you can't do this while Israel's in Lebanon. And there's sort of a tactical question about whether or not, you know, senior leadership in the admin can sort of get some detente in Lebanon from the Israeli side, whether or not there's a sort of Israeli perception that doing so is a, a thing to do, chronically or the thing to do tactically in order to give support to basically, you know, Republican chances of keeping that. This is one of the things that was talked about was like, is it, do you have a kind of Minsk Accord replay where in 2014, 2015, 2016, the, the Biden admin

was striking these sort of detaunts with Russia in the Ukraine-Dombass war, but not really striking a piece that was intended to be permanent, but rather to kind of relive. because, you know, there was a sort of a need to reload. And there's a question of whether an MOU 2.0 is kind of struck with Israeli cooperation in order to get through the midterm, stabilize prices, and then immediately ratchet back up. But the problem is that's now been telegraphed pretty widely. And you're basically telling voters, we are sort of doing this as a, temporary thing and then as soon as you vote, you know, vote us back in. We're going to

relaunch this war you didn't want. So, you know, that's like, that's a tough thing to speak to the sort of mega hesitance now. And since that's the core demographic that, in my view, will determine the midterms, you know, there's a real Rubik's cube that's difficult to solve here politically. I think that it's going to be really hard in the midterms because the coalition that got Trump elected has been shattered. So it wasn't just MAGA that got Trump elected. It was sort of the America first variation. It was Maha, the Maha moms. It was the libertarians. It was the disaffected liberals. And they all came together on a common cause. Like, you know what? We want healthier kids. We don't want war. We want the spending to be cut. And there's a lot of them that feel betrayed now

because a lot of those promises were broken. And, you know, as a libertarian, I will say right up, In the first three months of Donald Trump's presidency, he made at the Libertarian Convention. He made 32 promises to the libertarians. He made 20 to the world. He made 32 to the libertarians, implied promises like I'm the anti-war president and then actual promises. And he fulfilled 16 of those promises in the first three months, and then it stopped. And when it stopped, so did we ended up losing everybody that was in the administration for us. Or everybody that was, I mean, we lost Thomas Massey.

We lost MTG. Josh Kent. You know, Tulsi's gone. So who's left? RFK. That's really it. And then we're in war. And then everything is anti-Semitic. So people are just feeling disaffected. And disaffected people don't vote. They don't vote. 16 is way better than most presidents. Yes. Yeah. No, it was so optimistic in those first three months. And then it was like a switch flipped. Well, I mean, not to sound like I'm just cheerleading the administration, but I think that like the things that Trump promised that he hasn't been able to deliver likely were not within the scope of the presidency. Unless you want to like list them off and. I have them written down.

I don't have. Yeah. I'm all memorized 32 promises. The point that I'm making is like Trump will run his face. Right. And a lot of times he'll say, yes, I'm going to do this or I want to do that or what have you. And, you know, that doesn't mean that it's. actually in the scope of the presidency.

So, and I think a lot of, a lot of people that are critical of Donald Trump, that a lot of times they were expecting more than a president could deliver. That being said, the whole idea of like the MAGA coalition being shattered and stuff, I don't know, like, I'm not particularly plugged in with like the MAHA stuff. That was never my kind of perspective. But I understand that there are a lot of people that are, that feel like the president hasn't delivered for them. And, you know, as far as because my major concern was, was deportations and ending the, just the caravans of people coming in. For me, I'm like, all right, you know,

at the very least we've got that. So, I mean, I'm not, I'm not like, oh, this has, this has been, you know, gangbusters and stuff. But it's like you have to have some level of, like, expectation that's not at the highest level, right? Like I said last night on the show, I said, I expected maybe we get some continued tax cuts for the, for the citizens, and we get some deportation. That was about where I expected it to be, but the point was, he advertised himself as somebody he was going to tear down the system and build something new. Now, maybe I'm just politically naive, but I just, or whatever, but I didn't imagine that to be possible. And I imagine all presidents as overpromising. So if you can get two to three of the things that they're talking

about, well, that's, you know, it's, you know, not getting more doesn't mean I'm going to go vote for Roe Kana or a Democrat. But I, to Josie's point, though, like if people don't feel like they've got enough, no matter how much they've got, right? Just like a situation when it comes to like, you know, we talk about kitchen table issues. It doesn't matter how much money someone's making. It's, do they feel like their dollar is going as far as it should? Because people, people vote on feeling. So if there are people out there that were like, look, I wanted Donald Trump to do this and they don't feel like he's doing the things that they want, you can't get them up to go to the polls, especially when it's an off year.

Should have done the glyphosate stuff. Yeah, what? The glyphosate is the member of the one show, I was like, I woke up one day and I just see like one issue voters on glyphosate. I'm just like, bro. I don't even know what I like, I know that that's a maha thing, but it is. It's round, it's round up and it's illegal in other countries. And it really, affects the quality of our food. That's why when you go to Italy, you feel fine when you eat like wheat. But when you come to America, you feel like crap. And Roundup was being sued. Or Bayer, Bayer, who they kind of worked over, 11 billion dollars they were sued for. And I think it isn't one of the things that they passed saying, oh, you can't sue it. Yeah, you can't sue them anymore.

So when they're giving, they were sued over cancer. People were getting cancer. And they were sued for $11 billion, you can't sue anymore. And I, like, I get it. Is it because you can't sue because they were found. It's because you can't sue because they're just like COVID. Or they're corporate. Did they, were they found guilty and they had to or were they, was the finding against the company that? I'm not sure those logistics of it, but you can't sue this big corporation anymore. You're not allowed to. And it was like, I saw that. I'm like, look,

I get it because especially if you're if you're branding yourself as maha, then this is a singular issue that you care about extremely. But I don't buy that if you, if the next Democrat comes into office that they're going to have strong. positions on glyphosate either and I guess it's like cutting your nose off to spit your face but I get it like a lot of people felt like they were let down with those promises and the other thing is Charlie

is Charlie Kirk's murder is also shattered the coalition in the same way you mentioned Turning Point earlier like fundraising and turning point isn't the same fundamentally that it was a couple of years ago and that's another blow against the administration's they don't have that

access to the youth in the same way that they did before as far as fundraising raising and getting the kids out and really active in the community. Everybody knows that when it comes to door knocking, Democrats do it a thousand times better and they're a thousand times more effective. Well, exactly. And that is how they became what they are, the behemoth that they are. This goes back to McCarthy and it goes into the Vietnam War. They know how to get together. They know how to mobilize and they know how to get things done. And the fact that they vote in midterms means that they get into the school boards and they get into the selection.

and they get all these small little places where they infiltrate, and then they work their way up in the system from there. Change the laws. Exactly, and they change the laws. They work their way up. They influence your children, and that's how it's always been. So that's why McCarthy didn't go far enough. I seconded on that point.

We're going to jump to this story, and it ties in with what we were talking about. So from the Washington Post, the Saudi nuclear deal is in doubt, as Trump adds a new condition regarding Israel. A day after the agreement was signed, the president laid out a new requirement. that the Saudis normalized relations with Israel. Nothing like signing a deal and changing the rules afterwards. Saudi Arabia would need to normalize relations with Israel to receive the U.S. nuclear technology as long sought.

President Donald Trump said Thursday, adding a new and potentially deal-ending stipulation to an agreement signed just a day earlier. The nuclear deal, which was fiercely opposed by Israel and others concerned about nuclear proliferation, I'm not sure if it's really nuclear proliferation when it comes to Israel being concerned about the Saudis. But either way, is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, Trump said in a social media post, referring to the effort from his first term to normalize relations between Israel and the Muslim majority countries from which it had long been estranged.

The Saudis have thus far refused to join the accord. It was the latest whiplash-inducing policy shift from the White House, which had faced down considerable political opposition to push forward with the Saudi deal. The Biden administration also discussed a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, but tied any agreement to opening diplomatic relations with Israel, a move that has the potential, as the potential to reshape dynamics in the Middle East, but which remains distant. If the Saudis don't join the Abraham Accords, the deal is off. White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt said a few hours after Trump's post responding to questions from reporters, I know that obviously the big, the big,

one of the big problems that the administration and other previous administrations have noted about Iran getting a nuclear weapon is it would be, it would force Saudi Arabia to get it. Or you would Can I ask an art-hearted question first? Is this talking about nuclear weapons or nuclear energy? Nuclear energy? It's energy, but the issue is, is any civilian nuclear energy program can be sort of de facto dual use. Okay, yes, that changes the whole.

Yeah, because, I mean, look, Saudi Arabia is sitting on, you know, a ton of oil, so it's not like they particularly need nuclear energy, but... Well, the idea is by shifting to nuclear energy, they can export more of that oil. Okay. And that also would help bring down the, you know, by putting more supply on the market, it helps bring down the, you know, the price of it, you know, at a time like this, when there could be permanent perturbations in the global supply because of this, this would actually help a lot in a lot of ways.

And this is part of the broader Saudi strategy of diversifying into non-oil fields, you know, and they're doing this in all sorts of, and I were just talking about that this morning on PCC. Project 2030 or whatever they call their operation. That's why WWE is so heavily featured over there now. They have the comedians out there to do the shows. They want to become not just a destination for American entertainment or American citizens, but a net exporter for a lot of this stuff.

The idea is it's almost like being a cocaine dealer. Like they, if you wean yourself off the cocaine, habit you have more to ship you know this is the 10 crack commandments the biggie never get high on your own supply like they can just use all that supply as revenue rather than having to you know use it domestically to power everything to be fair um i'm i'm of the opinion that burning oil is probably not the best use for it considering it's basically like the wonder like it's basically like modern society fuel like everything we use is made of oil petrochem chemicals, fertilizer, all the plastics, every, you know, all the tires, like all of this stuff that

pharmaceuticals, yeah, that makes, makes modern life possible. Like, it's all a derivative of oil. And so just burning it in, in cars does honestly seem when you have other alternatives, uh, it does seem kind of like a waste. I mean, I know I'm a little bit biased because I've got an electric car, but like, you know, there are there are far better uses for oil. And it, so it makes sense to, to not need to burn as much as much as. we do and if Saudi Arabia wants to get on nuclear power I mean I do feel like the Saudi government is fairly responsible as an international kind of organization but I think that there are a lot of elements in the in the like in Saudi Arabia that are very very hostile to the US still I mean

you look at the you look at the the 9-11 how many people from for 9-11 were Saudis and stuff. Oh, come on. No, no, I saw your face, though. It's not like they were from, you know, it's not like they were Russians from, you know, they were from Moscow or whatever, no matter who, no matter who funded them or whatever.

But so I do think that there are a lot of elements. Was the CIA chief in Riyadh at the time? I don't know, who was it? John Brian? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Wasn't he a Muslim? I guess he missed. I guess he just missed the, have you ever read Michael Springman, the visa chief in the State Department consulate at the time who was surrounded 75% of the staff of CIA, wrote this book called Vizas for Terrorists

about that whole affair and it's eye-opening. You know, the thing that sucks is he's still walking around free. Well, yeah, but the pressure's on him. But anyways, but more to the point, like, I don't think that the Saudis having nuclear power is such a big threat to the U.S. But I do think that, you know, putting, making a deal and then saying, oh, you have to change the deal after it's been agreed to. That's a, that's a massive problem.

Like you can't sit there and be like, oh, now you have to go ahead and hang out with our friend too. It's like, you know, like you've already set the conditions for the deal, you know. Yeah. I mean, so what you have is kind of a left-hand, right-hand relationship with the Saudis and the Israelis in the Middle East, which, you know, in each case goes back 80 years. And in particular, the Republican Party and within that, especially the MAGA movement, the Saudis have been early and often supporters. Both the Israelis and Saudis came together in support of Trump,

really, ahead of the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton in large part because both the Saudis and Israelis hated the Iran deal that Obama struck. And this caused MBS in Saudi and the Netanyahu government in Israel to really clamor behind Trump as a counter-Iran maximalist. And it really brought the Saudis and Israelis together in an alignment against Iran from the Saudi perspective because Iran competes commercially and from the Israeli perspective because of the security. and other sort of regional dominance concerns. But I think that this is basically a way of tanking it. This condition Saudi is not going to agree to,

and it looks like the administration, just purely speculative, just how it reads on its face, is that they wanted to do this, and then the Israeli delegation put a lot of pressure on and said you have to add this, and our delegation, knowing it would kill the deal, but wanting to respect the Israelis, laid it on the table, and it basically kills it. So I think this is basically late stage pressure from the Israeli side to, and this is because

of the local rivalry. The Israelis don't want the Saudis to be able to have this capacity. MBS and Saudi has said that they would only develop nuclear weapons if Iran did, but obviously the Saudis being a nuclear power sort of. of changes the security balance in case there's ever a conflict between the Israelis and the Saudis, which is without the U.S. sort of peacemaking that is not off the table, you know, at some time in the decades ahead. But once you have nukes, you have nukes forever. And, you know, this could also cause a domino, you know, what other Gulf states. You say, hey, the Saudis have it, you know, us as well. And then it would, do you think it'd be likely that if the Saudi,

were to get, you know, like some kind of nuclear weapon, do you think that they would be like, oh, you know, UAE, we'll go ahead and we'll give you this technology or, you know, something like along those lines? Yeah, it's quite possible. I mean, the Saudis are kind of the alliance kingmakers in the region. And, you know, this also is something that I think, you know, the Democrats have a, are currently in a bind in terms of Middle East relations. because of the legacy Iran deal and some of the just stakeholder relationships with donors and whatnot with the DNC, where the Democrats are in large part significantly opposed to both MBS and Saudi and the Netanyahu government. And I don't think that, for example, a Democrat administration would want to strike this sort of deal with the Saudis and give them this, you know, dual-use capacity.

So I think there's sort of a time sensitivity to try to do this right now from the, from the administration side. But, you know, like I said, I just, I think this is a way of basically calling the deal off. All right. We're going to jump to another story that actually involves Israel. From Fox News, chaos erupts as House passes 1.15 trillion defense bill with Israel provision. and I don't know why this is part of the headline, but it says stop stoking Jew hatred. I don't know who said that. We'll get into that.

Let's see. From Fox News, the House passed its $1.5 trillion annual defense policy bill Wednesday after a bipartisan revolt over a provision, expanding U.S. Israel Defense Technology cooperation. The fiscal year 2027 NDA passed 216 to 212, with Republicans largely supporting in Democrats' most opposing the measure. The annual bill, which sets Pentagon policy and typically draws broad bipartisan support, received only six Democrat votes, as much of the caucus objected to Section 219 and the Republican-backed amendment restricting transgender care and easing access to personal guns on military bases. Is it really? Like, really? That's something they're going to talk about.

Anyways, opposition came from a coalition of progressive Democrats and Republican skeptics of U.S. support for Israel, who accused congressional leaders of shielding the provision from scrutiny after lawmakers were denied a separate vote to remove it. A fight erupted as support for Israel has weakened among House Democrats and some America-first Republicans during the war in Gaza and the widening conflict with Iran. Just one week earlier, 103 Democrats joined rep Thomas Massey from Kentucky in voting to block $3.3 billion in USA to Israel. For opponents, Section 219 would move the relationship in the opposite direction by embedding U.S. Israel cooperation more deeply inside the Pentagon's weapons development and acquisition system. The provision would direct the war secretary to

designate a Pentagon executive agent to coordinate and accelerate bilateral defense research, testing, and industrial cooperation. Critics argue that the structure would make the relationship harder for future administrations or Congress to unwind and could shift parts of the partnership away from highly visible aid votes into less visible technology, procurement, and production arrangements. Supporters said it would coordinate long-standing programs and give the United States faster access to Israeli defense technology. Josie, you were saying that this is, and I've heard a lot of libertarians saying that this is merging the U.S. military with Iran. I'm sorry with Israel. I'm probably going to do that again too.

Iran. And that was, as soon as I saw that, I was like, I don't buy that they're merging the militaries. So this, it sounds like they're basically taking existing programs and, and, and, and, making cooperation easier? What do you know about this? So first, it's a semantic argument. This is what happens because the concerns about this are very real, okay? But the people who are concerned about it aren't wording it quite right. It's not a merger of the militaries.

And when they say that, then it's trivialized. And people who are in support of this, they're able to trivialize it. So it's merging their military industrial complexes, essentially, is what that is. So it significantly undermines American sovereignty. Okay, it embeds Israeli tech into our weapons programs and our supply chains. And as the article said, it makes it so that Congress who would normally vote on this every year with appropriations can't do that anymore. It's going to be a different thing.

So they can't choose and be like, okay, maybe we don't want this this year. They won't be able to do that. And it also makes decoupling in the future almost impossible at this point because we know NDAAs, nothing ever gets changed in them. That's why we have the Propaganda Act was pretty much abolished. The Smithmont Authorization Act. Exactly, exactly. So it lifted the domestic dissemination ban.

We're never going to get that back. So as soon as it goes into that, it's a really bad thing. And what's big about this is that, yes, we do have these past agreements. But what it's doing is it's making our military depend indefinitely on the industry success and the policy success of a foreign nation. And once we're in that position, we have stared far too long into the abyss and we are becoming the foreign entanglement

in the permanent alliance that George Washington warned us about. And there's a slew of other issues that come with this too. Like we talked about an agent that's going to oversee all of this. Executive agent, yeah. Yes, an executive agent. So our founders didn't think we were ever going to merge military industrial complexes with another country. So the closest thing we have to this in the Constitution is treaty law.

But they're bypassing the treaty law. This isn't even a treaty. This is something entirely different. So there's no check and no balance for this guy. What is it? They're going to have to make something up and it's not going to be constitutional. And then we have to get into espionage. Okay.

Oh my gosh. Josie, our greatest ally, they would never spy on us. Oh, contrary. Well, I mean, everybody knows that. So the Pentagon's DIA. Yes, the Pentagon's DIA. last month said that they did a risk assessment on Israeli spying, and they ranked them at the highest level possible, the critical. They're critically spying on us. And four weeks later, we're like,

oh, you know what's a great idea for these people who are critically spying on us? Let's merge our tech, or let's merge their tech with our military. What a great idea. That sounds insane to me. And of course, since I'm not being really nice to Israel right now, let's talk about cutter. Okay? Cutter, didn't they give our country a plane? They gave our country a plane, right, for our president to fly around in. Now, when that happened, weren't there very legitimate concerns about safety and tech and spying that happened in that time? Yes, there were. So this isn't good when anybody does this. As a consistent person, I'm against all of that. And let's get into the votes. So Thomas Massey put forth an amendment.

And in that amendment, he said, let's strip the NDAA of Section 219. And the Rules Committee took one look at it, and they're like, absolutely not. And they made an executive decision. They didn't send it off to the House, and it just kind of vanished. But what they did send to the House was the rules as they existed. And that included with blocking Massey's amendment to strip the NDAA or strip a 219. out of the NDAA and like protect, protect the ND or protect the 219 and the NDAA. And everybody except Massey, all the Republicans voted in favor of that.

So then the NDAA comes and it's time to vote for the NDAA. And six Republicans join Thomas Massey and saying, I'm going to vote against this because the section 219. But that vote was meaningless and that vote was performative and that vote was safe because they just voted for the rules that blocked Thomas Massey. from stripping that amendment. And that's all I have to say about that. Well, so there's the Section 219.

They were also talking about Democrats. We're not backing it because of amendments, restricting transgender care and easing cases and easing access to personal guns on military bases. Is that just like misdirection? Or is that something that that? Well, I think what they're getting at is, is there may have been some pro-Israel Democrat

who were torn between their own coalition because it's a package deal. If you vote for this, then you are also voting for restricting the transgender care sort of thing. So there may have been some, you know, the vote tally may have been slightly different. I think it's just all they're trying to get out there. I mean, this is one of the closest. The NDA usually passes very easily, right? I mean, even when there was the, I forget what it was, but there's been a couple times where, you know, libertarians were pretty concerned about NDAAs. I think generally they are, but there have been a few issues about monitoring of, of.

Yeah, even the Smith-Munt repeal. The Aronest Asian Act was tucked into an NDA. That's why you couldn't get it out. It's the must pass, especially right now when we're in multiple wars. Yeah. And that was like almost every con. 14 years ago. 2012.

Yeah. It was 2012. So that's 14 years ago. Yeah. And also locking people up without any. Yeah. And definitely that was in an ending. And they still get passed with basically very broad bipartisan support.

We love Pfizer here. And but on this, you know, there are a couple of things about it that are, you know, a little bit eye popping in light of everything else playing out around the mega coalition dynamics. And, you know, as we talked about Republican, you know, sort of mega-hesitant voter mobilization, you know, that this has been a wedge issue, I would say since the 12-day War last year, you know, for this to be happening just a couple months ahead of the midterms when sort of the key coalition base that you're trying to mobilize are those, you know, that you may have lost because of prior endeavors around this issue.

You know, there is a, there is a very real path dependency. problem with this. Like a couple examples. So, you know, when we sell F-35s to foreign countries, you know, they want the latest and greatest jets and we sell them for a huge markup. But at the end of the day, we kind of have a kill switch on the tech. Yeah, and they don't ever, you know, in a conflict with them or if they're ever being intransigent in negotiations on trade or, you know, any oil or anything else we can always threaten to, hey, you're going to turn the keys off on the fighter jets and you're going to be left with nothing. And so there is a dependence on the underlying tech to say nothing of the issues around, you know, the fact that they could be bugged, for example.

There could be, you know, sort of, you know, encryption things on the back end that, you know, you're not aware of and the stuff is not necessarily all open source. And there's, there's an issue that I remember happened around AI and the Pentagon trying to get Anthropic out of the AI chain. And I spoke to folks in the Pentagon around this because Anthropic is a very, very heavy DNC Democrat kind of cesspool. But they do, Claude really is the best in class right now in AI as it currently stands. But there were problems between Anthropic and the Pentagon and all this kind of

political stuff. So, but the Pentagon was having a real hard time getting anthropic out of their systems because the interoperability problem is vast. You have so many systems that run on it and you can't just piecemeal change one thing without another thing getting affected and you form a sort of structural dependency at the base layer that would be prohibitively expensive or time consuming with. sensitive in process things happening, that you just can't branch off of it in the way that you might desire because you have this sort of core dependency. And you could see something similar

happening with respect to this 219, you know, where if, for example, one of the questions, when you think about this Saudi deal, you know, and as I mentioned, this looks like this was some kind of late stage intervention by the Israeli delegation, and the White House sort of sided with the Israeli delegation on it and inserted this provision knowing it would kill the U.S. Saudi deal. And the question is, well, what kind of leverage can a foreign country deploy, for example, when the delegation makes that ask? And sometimes it's over trade, sometimes it's over, you know, industrial concerns,

sometimes it's over security ones. But another one is, you know, if you don't do this. then we will cut off your access to this. We will limit our security, our technologies. And once you have Pentagon systems that are dependent on that base route, that becomes another point of leverage in any negotiation, whether it's security related or not. And now there already are significant Pentagon dependencies on this.

I mean, the sort of Unit 8200 and Amman, you know, type Israeli tech is already insignificant use, you know, at the Pentagon level. So it's not like this is something from nothing, but the legal requirement to do it and the fact that it is Pentagon wide, the executive agent is, as a Pentagon wide, this is not like one, you know, just one thing. This is all Pentagon systems, effectively, that will have this sort of mandatory Israeli military industrial complex integration, and there's really no precedent for this sort of thing. And it's happening concomitantly with the push, I believe, by Tom Cotton for mandatory intelligence sharing, making it illegal to not share certain classified information

with Israeli counterparts. And what does that look like? The mandatory intelligence sharing, right? So obviously, well, not not obviously. I would presume. That doesn't mean every bit of intelligence that the U.S. comes up with or produces. Is it only stuff that's pertinent to Israel or is it anything that Israel comes and says they want? And how would the Department of War say, well, this stuff you can have or this stuff you can't have if there's some kind of legal framework that says you have to give it to him? Well, this, so this is 622 from Tom Cotton, who is the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman. and he sponsored this. And this is not just Pentagon.

This is the entire intelligence community. And it primarily relates to things around regional threats. But it goes broader than that. It includes plans and intentions of both state and non-state actors. So, for example, if the CIA were to learn about plans or intentions of Hezbollah or something, or the Houthis or the Iranians or the Qataris. And it would have an impact materially, potentially on Israeli foreign policy or national security that effectively the intelligence community would be required by law.

It would be illegal not to share that with the Israelis unless the president himself intervenes and puts forward a justifiable legal reason under U.S. national security. not to. So it creates a legal mandate only overrideable by the president himself. And that is something that in good times is something that can be a good practice when you're dealing with an ally. But that's also, it sort of presupposes zero degrees of daylight around interests. And that's something that, you know, is when it's done by the legislature is hard to undo. And it sort of creates a signaling to even try to undo it. It's almost like to undo it in the future

is to sort of attack the alliance itself and has its own political baggage. But the fact that it's coming from the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the most powerful person in the Senate overseeing the CIA, shows you the kind of institutional support there is for that, and there is the question about, this is one more sort of mandatory integration.

It would be literally illegal not to do it. So it's a permanent change, it represents a permanent change in the way we handle our own classified documents. And so, you know, but that's also happening concurrently with, you know, this 219. All right. I think we're going to, we're going to jump. to another story that Mike has some info on.

From Fox News, Rand Paul releases docs that reveal FBI halted border inspection of virus research over Wuhan lab links. Mike sent me a boatload of links, but we're going to read the story here first. Agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection were preparing to question

a British zoologist and disease ecology expert upon his return to the United States from the World Health Organization's investigation into the origins of COVID-19 before the FBI intervened, and ask agents to stand down, according to files released Monday by Senator Rand Paul. They told the public a COVID lab leak wasn't possible, wasn't plausible, Rand wrote on X. Their own private messages say otherwise.

Today I'm launching the reading room where the public can view records related to my ongoing investigation, not just conclusions, but the actual documents. It's funny that they called him by his first name there, huh? The documents show CBP's National Targeting Center flagged Peter Dazex as a high person of interest ahead of is February 5th, 2021 arrival at JFK International Airport. DASIC, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance, was flagged because of more than 15 years of collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and his longstanding relationship with its lead researcher, Zengli Shi,

as well as his role as principal investigator on national institutes of health grants and funding bat coronavirus research in China. Much of the funding DASIC received was put forward towards gain of funds and research the document state. Now, the gain of function research stuff, Fauci swore up and down that that didn't happen, right? And he lied. And he did it under oath.

He lied under oath, and then he got a pardon for the crime. That was the Biden administration pardoned to me. Yes, yes. So why don't you go ahead and unpack a little bit of this for the viewer so they understand exactly what the reading room means and what kind of information Rand Paul has kind of made available? So this is coming from Senator Rand Paul, who has been, you know, an absolute pit bull on this issue since the pandemic itself.

But he has, this is sort of a continuation in a long line of disclosures that he's obtained around the intelligence community relationship with COVID, around the researchers, around the sort of cover up in media institutions. What was, what was just put, you know, made public by Senator Paul were the slack. messages between the authors of the proximal origin paper in March 2020 which was the sort of official explanation at the early stages of the outbreak about how this could not possibly humanly scientifically theoretically hypothetically at all have come from a lab namely the Wuhan lab that this was zoonotic in origin

this came from probably a pangolin you know sort of thing And that soup, right? Yes, right. Well, this was this, this, this paper was highly influential in quelling the early questions about the Wuhan lab. And what, what Senator Paul just published were the internal communications between the authors of this paper showing that they didn't believe anything that they were saying and that they, they were lying, they knew they were lying. and then they themselves subsequently got more and more shocked about the disclosures around the Wuhan lab. So to name a few highlights that stand out about this is, you know, they were frequently referring to, you know,

they said that the majority of the researchers that they spoke to thought it leaked from a lab. They admitted in their own Slack chats that they lied about, you know, there's a line in the Proxima Origins report, where it tries to downplay the gain of function bat-borne coronavirus research being done at the Wuhan lab saying that this is done all over the world in BSL2 labs, like lower security. You know, this research is done all over the world. The fact that it's done in the Wuhan lab doesn't say much because it's done everywhere. So if they were, you know, this, so it's really not that significant that was also done in Wuhan. It was the Bryce Nichols tweet that you sent, right?

Yeah. So right here. And what they say is, but that isn't, if you see, says, we describe in the paper and say that this work is performed all over the world, but that isn't true. It's exclusively been going on at the Wuhan Lab. And so, you know, for six years, you know, the official explanation is, oh, this ordinary course happens all over the world, but turns out it was only happening at the very lab where the intelligence community assessment

is that it leaked from and where the outbreak I mean it broke out in Wuhan China and at the BSL4 lab which is the highest security lab the BSL4 lab is the star of outbreak the 1995 Dustin Hoffman move me you know it's like a lot

you know this but what I'm getting at here is you know this this was a lie that they told knowingly in order to quell this and then they they seem to get so convinced in these messages that they're frequently referring, joking, that they're surprised that it leaked in Wuhan and that it didn't leak in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the UNC

Chapel Hill lab is. And that was, of course, run by Ralph Barrick and Ralph Barrett and the EcoHealth and Peter Dashik Boys, Dashik and Barrick are kind of the two domestic stars of this. Ralph Barrick, Ram Paul showed, had been working with the CIA and ODI and I on Batborn coronavirus research. He published their redacted comms in 2015 and the like. But this goes back to USAID. One of the most significant parts of these revelations in my view is the DARPA diffuse and preempt programs. So effectively, and I sent you one of the, comms on this, if you can put it on my screen at some point. This is the DARPA diffuse and DARPA

preempt comms on this. So here's what shocked even the authors of the March 2020 Proximal Origins paper, the cover-up paper. They did not know until 2021, you know, a year after they published this paper, that Peter Dashik had proposed, together with Ralph Barrick, a game. of function program to do bat-borne coronavirus, superjuicing bat-borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab to DARPA in 2018, just one year before the outbreak. And this, this is something, so basically the unique feature of SARS-CoV-2 was this insertion of a fern cleavage site that is evidently never been seen in a beta coronavirus before. And this is a very unique feature that sort of distinguishes what COVID is.

And as it turns out, Peter Dashik himself, together with his USAID funded team, proposed to DARPA to create the very thing that COVID turned out to be the year before COVID happened at the very lab in the very town it broke out in. And so when, because these slack messages, you know, go, go into that later time period, they describe what was an effective betrayal in their view that they came out and published this paper not knowing, you know, they were covering up for Dashik and Berwick, not knowing that they had proposed to DARPA to actually create the biological identical equivalent of what COVID is in that very lab. And now the part, this is the piece that you're talking about from DARPA, right?

Dr. Ralph Barrett testified to Rand Paul's committee in April that the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency preempt programs solicited proposals for gain of function of experiments almost two years before the COVID-19 pandemic, right? Well, that's, yes. Well, that's Barrick's testimony about it. But if you look for the comes between, I believe, Christian Anderson and, you know, on it, you can see how they reacted to the news that I believe the group drastic published. They learned what's so funny is these insiders in the, you know, virology, epidemiology, epidemiology profession, these, you know, esteemed researchers and scientifically acclaimed

high-profile figures learned about the DARPA proposal. the same time as the internet did and were themselves gobsmacked that they went out on the line to defend Dashik and Barrick, not saying, I couldn't have been a lab leak. And then they learned,

oh my God, they were actually creating COVID in the lab, in that very lab where it leaked from. Now, so the, now the defense on this is that, so basically you had two programs happening simultaneously. You had a USAID program and a DARPA program. USAID in 2009 created something called PREDICT. And this was a basically a global program to collect hundreds of thousands of

virus samples and then run various experiments on them in order to sort of chronicle potential outbreaks and develop vaccines, you know, to defend against them. That's where the gain of function comes in. You superuse a virus in order to create a vaccine to defend against in case that virus makes the jump, that variant of it. And so USAID had been funding Daschik, Barrack, that whole team for basically 15 years. From 2009 up until 2024, USAID had been running this. this program, and in particular what USAID did, it funded Peter Dashik to go into the Yunnan bat caves in southern China and collect tens of thousands of bat samples to bring to the lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute for Virology. And so Dashik had this very deep relationship

with the Wuhan lab on USAID payroll to bring all of these bat samples to be tested on in Wuhan, for, you know, basically a decade before the outbreak in 2019. Then in 2018, Dashik applies for this DARPA grant to say, listen, we have all these USAID-funded bat samples in the lab. We want to superjuice them with gain of function, and we want to insert a fern cleavage site into this to make it more easy to modify. And basically making monster bugs. Right.

And DARPA had this pre-existing preempt program. So you had the USAID Predict program and the DARPA preempt program. And this was sort of the USAID was funding, you know, collecting the bat samples. And DARPA was sort of, you know, developing vaccines on the basis of all the samples that USAID and the maintenance of the, you know, research community and everything that USAID was funding. So while Dashik and Berwick are working basically with both of these, USAID and DARPA, they go to the DARPA side of this, knowing that the USAID program money was about to run out, I believe, in 2020 or something like that. Daschik pitches in 2018 this diffuse proposal under the preempt

program to do this. And the official story is that DARPA declined this proposal. And so the idea was even though it looks shady as hell that the EcoHealth Alliance Network, working directly with the Wuhan Lab, was proposing to create COVID under the diffuse proposal. At the end of the day, DARPA said no, right? So they didn't get the DARPA money, is the official story on this, to do this. But the question is, could they have taken that USAID money or the NIH grants that they had and done it anyway for a number of reasons. They could claim scientific breakthroughs.

They could show some success. They could simply, they're already in the lab experimenting on these. Just because DARPA didn't go through with it or maybe was there, were there coms? Like we still don't have the DARPA side of this. This is one of these things where getting the internal DARPA comes would be huge on this. Like there's going to be a contracting officer. There's going to be all levels up and down the chain in reviewing this. Congress doesn't have the ability to pull people from DARPA in and have them testify or is it classified stuff?

I mean, ostensibly, they would be able to do it behind closed doors. Well, this is my ask since Dr. Paul, if you're listening, get the DARPA internal comms. I know that you're deposing Fauci or something next week. you've done excellent diligence on the CIA and ODNI and NIH and now the proximal origins front. But the DARPA internal comms will be very revealing in terms of the continuing relationship. For example, we don't know the reason that the diffuse proposal was turned down. It could be that they may now have thought it was viable, maybe come back after you've shown signs of success. There could have been comms that said, listen, we're not going to give you the money at this point.

but, you know, if you have a more promising blueprint for the amount of money that you're asking for, come back and show, this is a common thing that happens with these grant and contract negotiations is, listen, it sounds good in concept, but we don't want to bet on this startup proposal unless you have already shown it's got a high likelihood of success. So it's very possible that even if he didn't get authorized by DARPA to do it, that he did it in order to qualify for a renewed proposal. But then the outbreak happened the very next year, potentially with the very samples

that he could have been running those experiments on. The question was, is, was he doing it any? Were they doing it anyway? And there's a number of ways to get at that. One is the DARPA communications. Another is the USAID communications. Another are the Columbia and the UC Davis communications because the USAID program was administered by UC Davis and Columbia and Stephen Morrison that network.

And to date, we don't have any of those comms, files, records, emails, chat logs, any of that, it goes dark at the Dashik level. But Dashik was reporting up to his grant officers at NIH, at USAID, at DARPA under the preempt. And we need all of that. And we need it all unredacted. There should be nothing at this point that undermines U.S. national security about those communications. Nominally, these were not, you know, this is not classified program at NIH or AID or DARPA. And so that's the next logical step.

We should have a stack of JFK files level, you know, 100,000 documents over the course of all these years between Dashik, Barrick and the various grant officers. Okay, so what kind of, I mean, what's the likelihood that any of these, these communications would be able to be brought to like the public? Is this stuff that's, like I said, is it classified or is it something that you could actually show the American people? Well, this comes down to a threshold decision for the, that the administration will be forced to make if this is.

how much transparency to give on this. I texted you a very revealing comedic moment in this slack chat between the cover-up artists there. If you can pull up the quote around the Chinese conference, it says $15,000 and $15 million. And if you look for the one where he says, I'm about to give this talk, from KGA to KGA to KGA, KGA to Bob on Chinese speaking fee. Yeah, yeah, the Chinese speaking fee. This gets to, this comedic relief gets to the sort of heart of the issue about disclosure and whether or not, you know, this can or might be made public. One second here.

It was a speaking fee for what, for just like a conference or something? I almost don't want to reveal the punchline because it's so, it's. so funny and you have to remember the context that this is playing out in the middle of the first Trump administration blaming China and you have these sort of Chinese affiliated researchers who are okay so on Chinese speaking so these are again authors of this you know cover up report Chinese speaking fee reply back and ask for $15,000 and you'll say the virus is all natural $150,000 and you'll say it's from America or 15 million and you'll say don't Donald Trump made it. Perfect. Perfect. So this is...

Not a joke? Yeah, well, it's a joke, but it gets to the heart of the diplomatic sensitivities around disclosure around the USAID DARPA side of all of this, which is that, you know, the official story is, I mean, there's, I guess, several competing official stories at this point, but nominally leaked from a lab in China, but it was done, collaboration with U.S. researchers funded by the U.S. government. And so there is, if you remember at the time, the first Trump administration was almost campaigning on a global Chinese funded global compensation fund for creating COVID. It came from China. And this was, that, and then you had the sort of Democrat apparatus saying that's xenophobic and, you know,

there's a knockout game being played in New York City because of people attacking Chinese people over this. And this became this question about the role of Chinese complicity in this. Now, the problem, and in my view, one of the significant blockages in getting disclosure to this point, and one of the reasons in my view, the CIA and ODNI documents have to be so deeply redacted, and there's been so much national security interference in this issue is because of the fact that, you know, if you're going to blame it on Zhang Li Shi in China, who was her collaborator? It was Ralph Barrett, it was Peter Dashik. It was the whole, they were all on U.S. government payroll, military payroll, NIH payroll,

U.S. aid payroll, and we'd been working with that lab for 15 years doing it there. But the question is, is if it turns out that Dashik and Barrick were basically the progenitors of this, could that cause a diplomatic kerfuffle saying that it was, an American program that created COVID. It's literally a Scooby-Doo situation where you pull the mask off and it's just America underneath the mask. Well, that, that I think is the tail risk of solving the mystery. So what do you think the general, like,

how does the general public even see this now? Do they, do they have a take? I don't know. Like, one of the things about COVID and I guess the great thing about following up on this is that the public sentiment isn't there to continue to follow up on this, like the way people would like, right? Like somebody who's following it closely understands what happened was an unbelievable betrayal of the world in a sense. And for America to be at the heart of this, that's a huge problem.

But a lot of the general public has moved on and want to either pretend it didn't happen or they're not curious enough to ask, you know, was this something that came from a lab? Was it from bat soup? And I just like outside of working directly in the political sphere, I don't see a lot of a lot of curiosity around it. So I don't even know what the average person thinks about what happened. Well, I think that because there are so many technical layers in such a large cast of characters in fields that very few people work in, I mean, you're talking about like virology and veterinary medicine. Too hard for the average person to digest. And you're talking about a million of government agencies and this all. But I think that the public's interest would be reignited were you to find a smoking gun that either.

easily answers the story and goes, oh, that's why I had to, you know, lock down my kid. Oh, that's what, but the problem is is, you know, this is a long-term mystery to solve. And there's episodic updates. And, you know, there's, I think it's going to take that level of effort over, you know, the months and years ahead to sort of get deeper and deeper towards a sort of consensus answer up. but I do think that the opposition to investigating it has substantially gone away. What you had before was basically a block on investigating it. And while I think that sort of the curiosity level has gone down, so has the institutional opposition in a lot of respects.

And so, you know, the work continues. But I do think it's a living issue because one of the things, like Elon Musk was just interviewed, I think, earlier today or yesterday, about how shutting down USAID makes us more at, you know, risk about breakout pandemics. And right now, Ebola is circulating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it's because we shut down USAID. I had no idea that USAID had anything to do with funding the- And the fact that USAID may have actually created COVID is not a good look for arguing that

we should fund, you know, that USA was doing any good with respect to Ebola response or SARS or MERS, how many other outbreaks did USAID actually cause rather than prevent when we set up these programs in the very countries where the outbreak occurred? Is this the first time that, like, so this is the first time that I've heard that USAID was involved with with COVID? Is that something that generally the public is aware of or is this new information or? It has received less attention, I think, just because people hear DARPA and they go, Oh, Darba.

People hear the CIA, oh, Ralph Berwick was working at CIA, you know, and Fauci was such a big presence. And anyone that knows you knows that USAID. No, USAID has the longest and most extensive relationship with it. It was, you know, in this, in that article that you pulled up when it said that Peter Dash had a 15 year relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, well, date back to 2024, 15 years is 2009. That was that was when USAID predict was stood up. fact, you know, when the outbreak first happened, Dashik and Klan gave a quote to the press about, wow, it's incredible that there's that SARS-CoV-2 has a 99.6% biographic or basically biological match to the bats that we found in the Horseshoe Caves in Yunnan that we brought

to the Wuhan Institute of Virology on a U.S. aid grant. and that was seen as like USAID was bragging about that in the early parts of the pandemic to say, oh, this puts us in ready position to try to find a vaccine because serendipously, we happen to have the exact bat samples that match, you know, the, that match, you know, this SARS-CoV-2. How connected were they, how connected were they to the American medical companies that were trying to find a vaccine for this when we should have had a head start from the beginning. Well, I mean, intensely. I mean, they, this, there's a very, very deep relationship between USAID, DARPA, and the pharmaceutical companies. I mean, we've had multiple secretaries of defense who straight up came straight there. I mean, think about Donald Rumsfeld. He was on, he was,

he was, he was, he was the head of Gilead before he was made the, you know, Gilead, which made Rendemdesivir during COVID. You know, he was the, what, chairman of the board of Gilead, right before he was plucked to be the Secretary of War or Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, and then, you know, off to the races with anthrax and all this stuff getting, you know, all the, you know, bio-defense stuff set up by that very Pentagon. And what happens is, is these U.S. government agencies make the markets for Pfizer and J&J and Merck and all these companies overseas. The State Department, USAID, and military programs, create basically the markets for sale, distribution, ability to offload, you know,

backlogged products. And just even if a country doesn't want it, we basically use our diplomatic leverage. We use the humanitarian assistance to help them pay for Pfizer products. And we do this everywhere, Africa, Latin America, Central Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Far East Asia. and so there's this very deep relationship between the pharmaceutical companies and the national security complex, in part because the national security complex, when they declare a pandemic or when they declare a public health initiative, they're selling the products and forcing the sale in many respects in order to be, if you want to get your IMF loan distribution so that your frigging Zambian economy doesn't go insolvent,

you have to respond to this public health thing by buying Pfizer products. Nothing says cronyism quite like creating the problem so that you can sell them the solution. I don't even know how much I buy that like you mentioned the idea of like the smoking gun, but like you said earlier, Fauci lied under oath about gain of function research. And if the average person doesn't comprehend how serious that is, I just think that there's a whole lot of apathy from the general public. It's very acute when it's going on. But as soon as they're out again, they're not being surrounded by people with masks that remind them of what's going on.

in their back, living in the world again, that desire for, you know, change kind of goes away. The pardon that he got is a big part of why people have this kind of, you know, the, it was a big contributed to the cynicism that people feel. They're, they're just like, look, man, it's rigged, right? Like, he clearly lied under oath about something that killed a boatload of people around the world and basically shredded our civil liberties for a year and a half. half and the Biden administration just said, yeah, you're fine. And he had an instrumental role in the production of it. But to the admin's credit, they just arrested a couple months ago, his right-hand man, David Morins, who was the guy who was deleting, you know, tricks we

learned from the FOIA lady to make documents disappear after they've already been legally requested under subpoena or Freedom Information Act. And so, you know, there has been. I think an earnest attempt by the Justice Department to go after. This Justice Department. Yeah, yes. I mean, the David Morin's one is a big one. And, you know, they hit him with, you know, basically a destruction, concealment, destruction of federal records, violations of the Records Act,

which is something that he was bragging about. We knew about that under the Biden administration, the David Morin's emails and, you know, the destruction of evidence about the cover-up. and they did go, the Justice Department did hit him with, I think, like 15 years worth of charges. And, but, you know, Fauci is protected. There is one way that Fauci can go to prison. It's not going to be for a long time and it's not going to be for what he should go to prison for forever. Rand Paul is calling him to testify.

If he refuses to testify, then they need to Steve Bannon him. And that's the only way he will go to jail. Yeah, I mean, I mean, yeah, it'd be nice if he, you know, if he's like, no, I'm not going to go. and they just say, okay, we're going to get you for a contempt to Congress. I mean, he's deep, deep, deep swamp. So he's like a John Brennan. They're never going to go to jail. I think John Bolton's going to go to jail.

He's never going to go to jail. So they have sets of rules that they would use on Steve Bannon, that they're not going to use on Funchy, but that is a way. But that's, but the point that I'm making is like, that's not going to be satisfactory. Because the point is the reason people are so cynical, excuse me, cynical nowadays is because you know, they always get away with it, right? That's essentially how everyone feels. And even if he goes to jail for a year, people are going to be like, that's not enough. Because, again, consider the magnitude of what happened, right?

Shut the whole world down. Worse than that, they put him on magazine covers. Yeah. He was on underwear. He was on women's underwear. Do you remember that? I mean, that does suck. And it's bad that he got, you know, he was treated as some kind of.

He was treated as a deity. He was put on on like candles that Hispanic people burn. Yeah. But the point that I'm making is like he did something like the reason that everybody has felt like they don't, you know, they can't make ends meet is largely because COVID shut the global economy down basically for a year and change. And we printed all this money because of COVID. Like he's, he was instrumental in ruining a lot of people's lives. A lot of people, I mean, a lot of people, not just in the U.S., but around the world. Like, the whole world shut down.

So, like, I understand that, like, you know, the glorification of Fauci is bad and he got treated like a rock star. It's bad. But you're not going to satisfy people that had to watch their grandparents die through a, oh, through a glass window by saying, oh, he goes to jail for a year. This is the kind of stuff that. I would be okay with him. If I had the choice of nothing or jail for a year, I'd take jail for a year. Would I be satisfied? No, but I'd smile a little bit.

It'd be a little happy. But it's not justice. No, it's not. I mean, the larger justice is structural reform. I mean, if you shut down a mafia, but the mafia boss escapes to some island in a non-extradition, you know, country, you know, the problem is we don't want something like this to be to happen again. and we want to root out the structural problems that were exposed by this whole thing happening. And like, for example, there have been some very big structural changes. The shutdown USAID.

Shut down USAID, which arguably created this. And, for example, at NIH with Dr. J. Badacharya, you know, cut tens of millions of dollars of grants to do social media control around missing disinformation around public health threats. That was something that, you know, was, part of the cover-up was the censorship of being able to talk about it. So no one could dispute something like the Proxima Origins paper. To dispute it was to have a terms of service violation on the tech platforms, which was flagged by tens of thousands of government-funded censors.

And we've cut all that grant funding. And we've sent a very powerful message to future aspiring professional censors. This is not a good business to be in. You lose one election, and there goes all you're going to, you know, you don't have to get a service job in the gig economy because we are not in that business anymore. We've done structural reform to the way NIH and HHS grants work like that. And if you do that across a number of layers, you know, I think you can get to a point where there's a general feeling of accountability. But I don't think that we're fully there yet.

Yeah, I think that so this is part, you know, this kind of goes back to what we're saying about the midterms and stuff. like people vote on you know they vote on kitchen table issues um and the people that are most critical of the trump administration they'll they'll show they'll they'll say well you know he hasn't got fouchy and again i point to the fact that like look he was pardoned by the Biden administration and so really you're asking trump to do something that he doesn't have the power to do and you're blaming Trump for not having the power to do something. Like you can't, you don't want a president to come in and say, well, we're just going to send the FBI to wrap him up.

No, look, that's totally true. But there are other layers to this, like the one that I said about, you know, the Chinese speaking fee sort of comedy moment, which is when the CIA Stonewall's, Senator Paul, when OD and I, when a government agency is not responding to request for transparency on this, the White House could force that to happen. All it takes is a phone call, hey, make public everything about COVID. Hey, you know, you're not turning over these documents. Turn them over. There are things that could be done on this that are not outside. The point that I'm making at least as far as the midterms and, you know, more broadly, go ahead.

Sorry, I just just complete this point. Think about what happened with Senator Paul's hearing with the CI whistleblower on COVID around Fauci interference in the intelligence community. This, if you can pull it up, actually, the, if you just, you can probably find just through Google by saying CIA Spock's SPOX, like X, and then Twitter or X account, like response to Rand Paul CIA whistleblower hearing. This was about what specifically?

When was this? Yeah, this is Jim Erdman. This was the CIA whistleblower. There you go. Yeah, see that top one right there? So this was the CIA whistleblower who was working on, I believe, the COVID public health analyst type stuff,

who basically reported about to told the Rand Paul's committee in a public hearing about how Tony Fauci personally intervened and pressured the intelligence community to change its assessment about the lab leak. And then, you know, various elements of the intelligence community assessment about COVID were personally manipulated by Fauci and his minions. And, you know, this just happened, what was this, May two months ago. and so that was that was spearheaded by the legislative branch you know chairman paul but the executive branch which is you know the administration you know the official response to the CIA around this hearing was to attack the legislative branch for having a public hearing uh putting that was the last

tweet that they actually put up back in that was that's the most recent tweet they put up yes but but this is a mean they did this the same day the committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing a The CIA agency officer for testimony today without notifying CI, despite having already obtained closed-door testimony from the individual previously. The witness testifying today is not appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of truth, but instead in response to the subpoena issued by Chairman Paul, this proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing. As the CIA is already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous. Now, this is not an honest thing to say. Nothing in that testimony challenged the conclusion about a lab leak.

If anything, it supported it. It was about how Dr. Fauci and his minions personally intervened on the CIA and ODI and I at the time in order to change their hypothesis about it being a lab leak. It's more evidence for the very thing that they are disingenuously claiming that it somehow undermines. Of course, it's not undermining it, but what it does is it reflects poorly on the agency about how the agency acted as a political instrument operating at the behest of political pressure from the Fauci establishment rather than making an independent assessment of what caused COVID. But that's an executive branch agency. That is not something that is outside the control or influence of the administration.

They report directly to the White House. And so the picture is complicated on that front. I understand what you're saying, but the point that I'm making is when you're offered a binary choice, right? And your options are either Republicans. And in this particular context, your Republican representative or your Democrat representative or staying home. So you've got three options, right? If you stay home and Democrats win, then this doesn't get any better. don't get any support. Of course, 100% to Josie's point. Like what Josie was saying, the option

about the Steve Bannon option, you know, he declines to show up, you hit him with contempt charges. 100% of Democrats are going to back Fauci on that. Yeah. And you're going to have enough Republicans to get over, you know, the threshold. You're going, like, for example, John Cornyn just is holding up the Senate nominations for Ambassador of Doug Maastriano and Carrie Lake right now until the, until the Trump administration administers the PEPFAR funds, you know, the USAID PEPFAR money. You know, so basically in Africa.

So he's basically, so you have a Republican senator from Texas. What an odd demand. Saying that he is not going to allow Kerry Lake or Doug Mastriano to Maga Stalwarts to become U.S. ambassadors until the Trump administration administers U.S. aid money for AIDS in Africa. Yeah.

Now, why is that? I mean, look, you know, you look at the paperwork. I mean, guys, like, you know, you're sponsored by Gilead. He's backed by the pharmaceutical folks. You know, look, I'm not going to draw like, you know, too many tea leaves on that. But the thing sort of speaks for itself, but it gets to, do you think that Senator Cornyn would, you know, who's he going to side with on the contempt, you know, the criminal contempt, you know, issuance by Congress over Fauci? Do you think he's going to side with the pharmaceutical donors,

or you think he's going to side with the- Well, Cornyn doesn't like Trump anyways, right? Well, is he actually? Well, that's the Ken Paxton race, right? That's the Ken Paxton race. Yeah, he's, yeah. But it was, it took a long time for Potus to, you know, come out and support of Paxton. You know, there's, there's a complicated relationship, I think, that exists because Trump ultimately needs all these folks to back a budget. You know, if, you know, not, they side with the Democrats. This is how a lot of the doge cuts were not kept by Congress. And then there's a question, how much political leverage does the White House want to exert? And it comes down to a log trade. You know, at the end of the day, if they decide not to go

or to abstain or to vote with Democrats, the White House can't get anything done. There's not a large enough majority of MAGA folks. And that's to my broader point, right? So after the midterms, if the Republicans were to lose the House because they're probably going to keep the Senate. It still looks like that. But if they were to lose the House, all advances stop. You know, the House of Representatives,

like they're going to start doing the impeach Trump. They're going to start doing everything. They can slow everything down as well. And so, yeah, exactly. So I guess my broader point is it's like when you've got a bad option or a worse option, and you have a binary choice.

You like to say, well, we didn't, because all the stuff you listed that Trump has done in the administration, right? Like, just the USAID cuts. That's a huge thing, right? Like all the stuff that they attempted to do with Doge, they didn't get even a majority of it, but they did make some cuts with Doge.

And there's a lot of things that, you know, we've talked about here tonight that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for, a Republican administration coming in. If it wasn't for Donald Trump, you know, the, the, the fact that Fauci was, was given immunity or, or pardoned, you know, that was probably not even by Joe Biden. It was by someone in his administration that actually, you know, probably signed with the

auto pen or at least told him that he should because, you know, we don't know exactly how much Joe Biden knew from day to day what was going on. And so I understand being upset with Trump, but the way that people, you know, characterized Trump as doing nothing and, and that is, that is just flatly wrong. And when you've got a binary choice, you know, you're, you're, you're looking at a situation of like, look, you can go with bad or you can go with worse. I don't think, and Josie, maybe if you want up, I feel like I've been talking a lot. I'll just say one thing and then I'll just be like, it's a big topic. But I don't think that in general, the voter mobilization issue for the Republicans is

about Trump not doing enough on on various things. I think it's the things that he has done in the maga stalwart camp versus the proactively versus the things that he's done proactively that the maga stalwart camp firmly disagrees with. Not not apathy or uh or the like. It's that the things that have affirmatively been done and that that are good and things that have affirmatively been done that are that are bad is sort of in the cross hairs. And I think that the key issue for that demographic of sort of mega voters in 2024 as they go into 2026 are right now shaping up to be issues around sort of the pro-Israel foreign policy side on the right versus the woke wokeness stuff on the left and there is that choice that

demographic is sort of faced with where it's they don't like the democrats they don't like the woke stuff, but they also do not like a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget in Section 219 and in Iran war and, you know, Section 622 and the like. And so they are, they're sort of caught in this crosshairs where they don't like this direction, but they don't like this. And there's this weird irony where the very woke faction on the left is the, is the hard, most hardcore anti, you know,

anti-Israel side, which is their main gripe. You know, so there's this weird triangle where, you know, how much, where there is no option, you know, because everything's a packaged deal. Josie, is it 2004 again? Are the libertarians in a position where they're like, well, the Democrats suck and the Republicans suck? So we're just going to stay home because, you know, I remember back in, you know, 2004, 2008, everybody hated George Bush.

You know, libertarians hated him. Yes. Um, they didn't really like the Democrats either. I don't think that the Democrats were as offensive back then because the woke thing hadn't really kicked off. It was more just liberal like Kennedy Democrat almost. Yeah. Um, so do you think, you know, being tapped into the libertarians far more than I am nowadays? Like, do you think libertarians are, are most likely to just stay home? Or do you think that they're actually going to say, well, I really, really don't like the, the Israel stuff. So I'm actually going to vote with the, the, Democrats because they're more critical of Israel, they're more Israel skeptical. Libertarians won't vote with Democrats largely. They will either vote for their third party as like a protest vote or they will stay home because what we have, when you vote, Republican or Democrat right now the way libertarians see it, you get a gay war or you get a holy war. So the choice is which would I rather, would I rather have the holy war that's going to

lead us into the second coming and the end of the world? Or do I want the gay war with the gay war where you know they're like we remember the last 10 years we were being silenced. There was there was a censorship to a level we've ever seen. The world was mentally ill. Like everybody didn't know what gender they were and we still have some of that but it's like people are waking up and we're seeing that with the main election where the Nazi didn't quite work out. So now we're going to try this guy that thinks he's a woman and is clearly not. I love him. I love him. I love him because I want him to be put on the national stage. I want people to see what the Democrats are backing. I hope he gets the nod.

Libertarians in Maine may vote for him just for the memes. I want that guy to go to con. I want him to go to the, especially to the Senate with like everybody's got their nose in the air and they think they're so special, you know? Yep. So that's the way that I see it. You have to decide if you want to have a gay war or a holy war. or just not vote at all and see which one you get big guys. The Big El libertarians, like the Chase Oliver types, that's the gay war. Yes. Actually, no, that's the, they're in support of the gay war. They're in support of the gay wars.

On the gay side of the gay war. But they'll vote for their own person. They're not going to leave. They're going to vote for the libertarian. These are the diehard libertarians. And honestly, how I see it, I'm a small out libertarian, so I'm a libertarian by just in principle. I'm not affiliated with the party, but I was doing some stuff with them to kind of help with a crossover. So I was going somewhere with that and I completely forgot.

Happens all the time. Yeah. I mean, a big part of it is like because, because like you said, there's a lot of the stuff that's quote unquote woke feels like it's fallen by the wayside. Even though we had the Sophie Cunningham story pulled up, what I was thinking about is like those stories feel. Yeah, I know. But like those stories feel like a distraction now. Like when we get into stuff about gender politics, especially in sports, it's important, but it feels like for a lot of people, it's politically distracting because the general public has made their thoughts on it fairly clear. And while these debates are still going on, it doesn't feel as expedient or as necessary as talking about what's going on perhaps in Iran because it's affecting our gas prices, our ability to get around, your businesses suffer.

Everything suffers in that sense. So you really are caught between two choices that are really bad. Now, the one we were talking about that was going on during the Biden administration, that felt like it hit us more at home because it was all encompassing in your way of life, whereas one of them seems to be tied more to your pocket. I mean, you could be talking about nuclear proliferation and maybe it's the end of the world, but we've been dealing with wars in the Middle East for as long as any of us has been alive. all of that being said, the other stuff felt closer to home, but it now feels like it's more in our rear view, even though it's probably always going to be this omnipresent thing that will make a comeback after, you know, somebody spends a term in office, things change. It doesn't really ever go away. I remember what I was going to say. Libertarians should vote for a smaller level in the same way that the communist did because that's how we infiltrate. Communists are not human. And that's not. that's literally what it's written into the code of our country. But it's a bottom-up approach.

So if you're going to vote for a libertarian, you're going to vote for them in your school board, you're going to vote for them for your sheriff, you're going to vote for them in your select board. And those are the libertarians that are going to get into office. If you do the protest vote, they're never going to get into office because back with Perrault, when he was a spoiler, they were like, oh no, we can never have this happen again.

So in the future, libertarians or any third party are going to need to have five polls where you get 15 percent, and we're going to choose those. polls. So it's designed so that libertarians can never compete. And it's very hard because you're going to have the DSA candidates down there winning the elections and getting the laws change. Exactly. So what are they doing when they try to get up to a higher level? They'll infiltrating the Democrats. So that's the way to do it. That's how you do it. All right. We're going to go to one last story here from the New York Post. New York City attacker Yalalahu Akbar as he randomly stabbed two

men near Central Park according to victim. Witness says the commission. Two men were stabbed in an unprovoked rampage on the Upper West Side near Central Park on Thursday afternoon by a deranged attacker yelling Alahuah Akbar during both attacks. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said. Investigators were probing whether the suspect Raul Morales, 51 was motivated by hate, though Tish said, Tish also said the initial investigation suggests that the mental health may have been a factor. Detectives are continuing to work the case and determine motive, but according to victim and witness statements, Morales yelled, Allah, Akbar, meaning God is the greatest in Arabic during both attacks. The top cop said in a statement. The NYPD is currently evaluating whether this is a potential hate crime, she wrote.

Is it possible or is it likely that nowadays, because of the Internet and because of the U.S. involvement so heavily in the Middle East for the past 20 years, do you think that this kind of exclamation is like a meme? because I do see people that are, I mean, even Donald Trump, you know, I think he said inshallah, you know, and it's weak. And the point that I'm making is, you know, I see people in, that are, you know, not Muslim saying, inshalla all the time on the internet because of the meme for it. You know, like it's a, you know, it's a meme. Does the meme make it all the way to stabby stab? I don't know if the mean makes it all the way to. I think the stabby stab comes from crazy guy. Crazy guy's meme.

Yeah, it's true. You know, it's a crazy guy. name, Raul Morales. He doesn't really sound Indian. No, I mean, it doesn't sound, you know, usually it's something a little more, a little more Arabic. I do want to talk about hate crimes in general. Now, do you think hate crimes are, like, do you believe in hate crimes? No. Okay. Good. We're all on that same page. I don't believe that a crime. Hate crimes are thought crimes. Yes, exactly. And I don't believe that a crime is any more heinous because of the intention of why you did it. If you murder a child because you're a psychopath or if you murder a child because you don't,

like their skin, it's still, you still murdered a child. You're still just as, it's just as heinous. So we all oppose that. Okay, just going into this, they're investigating whether it's a hate crime. I just wanted to get that on the table that hate crimes are thought crimes. No. Terrorism crime. Yeah, that's something to look into. Yeah, because he said al-a-hawakbar, it makes me think that it would be a terrorist. It makes me think he's a Hispanic guy that's mentally ill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so that, and honestly, I don't think that. I mean, it's New York, so it's whoever is in the vicinity that he's going to attack. So I don't know.

It could have been targeted. I'm sure they're going to try to figure that out. I think this is unlikely to be actually terrorism. I do think that it's kind of like a crazy dude that was just like, you know, honestly, he was, as gross it is, he was meaming because this kind of, of, these kind of things, if you're at all on the internet, you see these kind of things all the time with people just saying things because they, you know, it's become part of the national consciousness or whatever. Celebrities are saying inshalla.

Yeah. That's part of why I thought of it. What's an inshala mean? Inshallah, God willing. Oh, I would go further than Josie and say not just get rid of the concept of a hate crime, but get rid of the concept of a mental health defense. Yeah. Yeah.

Somebody who's mentally defective, that's even worse. Yes. Then, like, definitely get them off the streets. Definitely put them in jail for life. Yeah. Why do they soften the crime? When it's like you are a free year. Now you know there's going to be recidivism because even if you atone for this crime,

you're mentally broken. Why is that there? Like why is it baked into our legal system to show that type of compassion? The argument is they don't actually know what they're doing. And with the proper mental health treatment, they could reintegrate into society and be a normal person. But unfortunately, they do the same thing with pedophiles. Well, that's. We just need to help some help.

That's a whole different topic that, that does. deserves a whole different means of punishment. And pedophilis shouldn't be treated as if it's a mental illness. Treated like it's a mental illness. It should be, it's a violent assault. But when it comes to, you know, the argument of, oh, you know, these people, once they get actual, you know, the help that they need, then they can go back into society. But one of the things that you see consistently with people that are struggling with

mental illness, especially if they're, you know, severely mentally, they'll like this, you give people medication and they start taking their medication and then they feel better and then invariable and not all the time of course but very often people start thinking I don't need this anymore because I'm okay now the medication fixed it now I don't need to take my medication they stop taking the medication and then the condition returns because it's not something that goes away with medication the medication treats the symptoms it treats whatever the mental illness is it doesn't actually fix a person that is that has a you know a mental illness it doesn't make the mental illness actually go away. It's the medication, you know, changing the way they perceive

the world. So putting people on medication and just saying, okay, go back into the world, you have to have someone that monitors them, make sure that they're taking their medication. And when you're dealing with what frequently happens is people that are homeless or drug users, like that kind of, the people that are mentally ill and homeless and drug users, it's a Venn diagram that gets real close to a circle. I used to day to girl that that was a, she was in the nursing field as a prescriber and stuff and she dealt with a lot of people that were mentally ill and that's what happened. It would be, you know, they would get them into the facility. They would give them medication. The medication would work. They would feel better and then they'd be let loose again. And then three, four months later,

they were back because they stopped taking their medication, started using drugs again. So the idea that you can have someone that's very mentally ill and be like, like, okay, well, now you can go back into society. Like, that is just as bad as taking someone that's incredibly violent and saying, okay, you can go back into society. People talk about the point of, you know, incarceration is to, you know, is to rehabilitate them. And that's not the point of it. The point of it is to take the people that are dangerous and can't function in society

out of society. Now, it's, you know, it may be a hard pill for some people to swallow. And sure, there are people that make mistakes and end up in jail because they did something dumb that they don't normally do, or they wouldn't normally do under normal conditions. But the fact of the matter is, the point of incarceration is to take dangerous people out of society and put them somewhere where they can't hurt other people. And to treat it, to treat people that are mentally ill differently than you treat someone that has a recidivism, for violent attacks, that's a bad policy. Whether you be a person that just can't control your temper and, you know, attacks people for no reason or is just likely to attack someone because you're a violent person, or if you're

a person that's mentally ill and, you know, the voice has told you to stab that guy. For everyone else in society, it's the same. It doesn't matter why you did it, just like we're talking about hate crimes. It doesn't matter that you were, you did it because you, you know, don't like the way this person looks or you don't like this person's background or whatever, you still committed a violent act. And you can't know someone else's mind. You can't know their thoughts. So the solution is you go to jail and we take you out of society. No, you just abolish the prisons. That's what the GSA wants to do. What do we think about reopening asylums? I think it's a great idea.

It's there are dangers, of course, because, you know, especially. Yeah, they can be abused in the same way that jail can be abused. Well, not only that. I mean, I mean, the way that, the way that, you know, historically, the way that communist countries would get rid of people they didn't like is they would say, oh, he's a crazy person. Look, he's talking about these crazy ideas. Like, you know, he's talking out against the party. And so we have the modern day, ubleyette. Yeah. Well, yeah.

Well, you see them doing this with COSA and the Kids Online Safety Act type thing where, you know, they're making an argument. Basically, the kids should be banned from social media. should have certain access restrictions or there should be platform accountability for algorithms that have addictive content. But all they mean, if you listen, like this lawsuit being led against Facebook by the state of California,

I mean, Gavin Newsom's wife basically gave the game away about why they're bringing the lawsuits because her kids were watching Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, but they're cloaking it as like a mental health problem. They're basically saying it's a mental health problem. They're basically saying it's a mental health problem, you know, if you listen to right-wing

conservative aligned content and that the platforms have to be punished for allowing a, basically a competitive marketplace of ideas because the wrong ideas give kids mental health problems. Their platforms aren't strong enough, so they make our platforms illegal. You know, one of the things that, and I do think that there should be asylum, right? I do think that when it comes to people that are, you know, that are violent and mentally ill, they should be removed from society. They probably shouldn't go to regular prison because then they're just going to be violent

in regular prison, making regular prison even worse. But one of the things that I think is a significant concern is you'll see people on the left if they get into positions of authority and power, they'll go after religious people. They'll say your religion is a crazy person religion. The way that you, you know, normal Christians or normal people don't think that, think this like. And so your religion makes you, you know, makes you suspect. I mean, the Biden administration had already been, had already been targeting religious people and stuff. They were targeting Catholics.

So, yeah, they would, they would absolutely do that again. So it's a, it's a double-edged sword. And it's a very, very dangerous thing to allow the government to, you know, to commit people without, without, oversight, but at the same time, you know, when you've got someone that is obviously dangerous, then, you know, I think it's an all right thing. But, yeah, I mean, it's, even without opening asylums, I mean, just think about the nature of an insanity defense. If someone is eligible for 10 years in prison and then they tell me they're also insane,

I go 20 years in prison. I don't say five. Yeah, yeah. Like, what's the recidivism rate for someone who's freaking insane? We're looking at the guy who killed arena who stabbed her in the neck. Yeah, he shouldn't. I mean, oh, he can't stand trial because he's too crazy, but let's lit him out of jail. Into the eubliate.

All right, we're going to go to Super Chat, so why don't you smash the like button, share the show with your friends. Head on over to Rumble.com and become a member there, join Rumble so that way you can watch the after show. And then head on, head on over to Timcast.com and join the discords so you can call in. But right now, we're going to go ahead and read some of your Rumble rants and Super Chats. Have time to go to the bathroom? Yeah, you do. I mean, someone might have a question for you. Is it the changeover?

Not yet. No, not yet. Just a few minutes. Let's see. I need Mike's help. This is from Tekken something. I need Mike's help. Are we supposed to like the CIA?

Are we supposed to hate the CIA? Are they a necessary evil? Should they be destroyed? I'm so confused. I get these types of questions all the time. And I always refer to the, if you go on Google and you type in chess sitting with tension, I'm going to just describe broadly how I see this.

Do not try to arrive at the good, bad answer if you are asking this question. Just see things plainly for what they are and try to get past the normative thing. This question is usually a symptom of somebody who is uncomfortable with the tension on the board. They see some good things. They see some bad things. They see some really ugly things. They're trying to, they want to say, is it good or is it bad, so that I can cross this. off the list of something that I am concerned about so that I can focus on something else or I

can put this to bed and there's no longer any tension in my head about what this thing is. And you will never get there. You will never get to a point where there is no tension on this issue, whether it's about intelligence collection, whether it's about covert action, whether it's about, you know, hawks or doves in terms of, you know, the America's role in global warming. leadership and what we need to, you know, it's a, it's a dirty world out there. And dirty work sometimes has to get done in order to protect ourselves or in order to stay ahead of problems or in order to shift the balance of power in various places or regions or industries or whatever.

And I, the attempt to label the whole thing good or bad is a attempt to relieve the tension on the board that you feel having to juggle all these things. But if you just recognize that this is just a chess board with a lot of pieces on it and just try to understand the pieces and make your own judgment about any particular piece. The answer will sort of come to you any given month or any given, you know, period of your life where you agree or disagree with what it's doing and be guided by the reforms that you seek to make rather than a top-down good, evil. And this is something I mentioned on our show a lot.

This is why the CIA propaganda arm is spent so much time in Hollywood, because they want to give the uninitiated and the people who don't have the will to look super closely into it. They want to give them a generic feeling of positivity that they're working towards U.S. interests, which generically means your interest, which is why they've been working with Hollywood to help the accuracy of their movies for decades. But we are initiated. Who asked that question? I don't remember. Let's see.

I can't even see his whole name. Technical, Lyer. Technical liar, I'd say with MK. Ultra, Bay of Pigs, Iranian coup, the Phoenix, the Iran-Contra, the post-9-11 behavior. It's okay to not like them. I think that I'm going to go with Thomas Seoul where there is no right or wrong.

There is only trade-offs. You get a little of what you want and you get a little of what you don't want. And that's kind of the way that like reality and life is. So, let's see, from Carlo Magno Cal, Phil needs to read articles with rock and roll enthusiasm. How's that? A little better?

I love it. She's that. From Taylor says, the roundup suit failed because they were being sued for something they aren't required to do, and state law can't override federal law. You don't want states making laws targeting companies they don't like. I don't know enough about the details of the suit to actually speak on that. Yeah, you got that out. Hawk Dude 83 says,

Hey Tim Cass, big fan, Mike. Tim is there really a difference between hero and anti-hero? Has there ever been an anti-hero that became a hero? I always relate to the anti-hero. I mean... It's a green goblin. Gaston from Beauty and the Beast was an anti-hero, and I will die on that hill.

John Wick. It depends on the... And how far they've gone initially and what your thought. are on, you know, the, like, for instance, the Punisher kills a lot of bad guys, but it depends on whether you think that that's justified. Are you a strong proponent of the legal system that these people go be put in front of a judge? Like, Daredevil will, you know, it's like Batman, right? He doesn't matter how many times he brings him to Arkham Asylum,

they're going to get out and kill a bunch of people. There are a lot of people that are okay with him. He never does, you know, at least not when he's in the proper timeline, making that decision, but the anti-heroes will. And so it's a matter of personal preference. I don't know what the body count is on Deadpool or Wolverine, but either of those two, they don't have a problem with killing the bad guys. You could say that an anti-hero can act heroically.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, a lot of it would end up being that they learn to make those choices as it goes on. A more interesting story is to see an anti-hero shed that skin and become a hero in the eyes of the public. I don't know why you can't. just give Batman or Superman a law enforcement badge and just deputize them to use lethal force against people who are using lethal force. Like, why don't they just, just, you know, it's, well, from a storytelling perspective, it's not as interesting.

Yeah, but like then it's, then it's, then it's, then it's over. It's like, they're protected. They're protected like the police are when they shoot people. Also, yeah, he's got, he wears a body cam. He wears, and he can be sued in court if he uses unlawful force. But he's got a mascot. He's got, he's got his identity concealed, so there's no way to properly prosecute him. We do the same than the spies.

They have a double, you know, double affinity. All right. So like I said, smash the like button. Share the show with all your friends. Mike, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Where can people can find you? I mean, on X at Mike Ben Cyber.

Also, same on YouTube, Instagram, rumble, all that jazz. Josie. You can find me on X, T-R-H-L official. You can find me on YouTube at the Josie Show underscores in between the words. And Casperoo Coffee. I have a coffee. And it is very patriotic. and I would suggest going over to casprutoffey.com and checking out my delicious amazing coffee.

If you guys want to follow me, I am on Instagram and on X at Brett Dasevik on both of those platforms. You should check out PCC. We are live five days a week, Monday through Friday, 3 p.m. Eastern, which is, of course, noon Pacific. Tomorrow we will be going live at 2 p.m. Eastern celebrating episode 1,100 of the show. We celebrate every 100 episodes because it is a good thing to appreciate it when you have it. So you should join us there. Also, if you are a member of the Timcast Disc, I do shows twice a month at 7 p.m. doing small show, cover a couple of topics. Hang out with you guys. I'll be there on Saturday night. I will see you there. I'm Carter Banks. You can find me at Carter Banks on X and at Carter Banks official on Instagram.

Record label is at Trash House Records on YouTube. Got a new song up there. Y'all should go check it out. Yeah, let's get into the after show, Phil. Don't forget tomorrow if you're a Tim Kord, Timcast Discord member, you can come on down to the Kasperu, coffee shop in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Come hang out. I'm going to be there. Ian's going to be there. Tim's going to be there. A bunch of people will be there. I'm not sure what's going to be there as well. Ian's going to change the weather.

So come on down. I think it starts around seven. If you're a Discord member, or is it just, do you have to have advanced? I think. I'm not sure. We sell out the tickets. Yeah, they're sold out. There are tickets. It's a thing that Olivia Clear would know more about than I would. But tweet at Olivia Claire. She'll help me off. I'm Phil. It remains on. I'm Phil it remains on Patreon.

The band is all that remains. You can check us out on Apple, Music, Music, Amazon, music, Pandora, YouTube, Spotify, and Deezer. Stick around for that rumble after show. That starts now.